The Individual and Collective in Russian “Women’s” Writing
Butler is clear that this negotiation and the liberation it promises to deliver occurs at an individual level. Indeed, they even warn against gender politics that aim to build collective identity, writing that “the identity categories often presumed to be foundational to feminist politics…simultaneously work to limit and constrain in advance the very cultural possibilities that feminism is supposed to open up” by propagating fixed identities that do not allow for agency within individual performances of gender (Butler, 147).
The Russian writer Ludmilla Petrushevksaya (born in 1938) presents a similarly individualistic understanding of liberatory gender politics in her short story “Among Friends.” Throughout the story, Petrushevksaya emphasizes the role that motherhood plays in the gender performance of the narrator’s circle of friends, writing that “By then we all had had children” and describing how a couple who were “sentenced to childlessness” were “pitied” because they would not be able “to live normally, to worry about feedings, childcare, illnesses.” At the story’s very end, the narrator uses her individual sense of agency to negotiate the gender performance demanded of her by cultural norms by construing a secretive plan that revokes her of her maternal rights and duties. Because she works alone and uses her own, individually-sanctioned power to resist dominant gender norms, the narrator of “Among Friends” can be understood to be engaging in the personally liberatory gender politics espoused by Butler in Gender Trouble.
The same cannot be said of artistic works pioneered by the contemporary couriers of women’s, feminist, and queer cultural production in Russia today. Oksana Vasyakina (born in 1989), for example, presents an undoubtedly collective understanding of liberatory gender politics in her poem “Wind of Fury – Songs of Fury.” In the work, individual rage towards the harm violently rendered on women as they exist within dominant and heteronormative gender performances is subsumed into a collective that finds its strength in the amalgamation of this individual pain. “There are so many of us that there is enough/sweat and flesh for everyone/And no one will notice/…and no one will dare call you damaged,” Vasyakina writes, rendering a liberation that requires the dissolution of individual identity into a nameless, but agential, “we” (Vasyakina, 39). For Vasyakina, liberation is not the agency of individual gender performance, but the strength of a collective suffering wrought by the collective repetition of society’s gendered script. “Who am I/if not these bright-red poppies,” Vasyakina writes, imagining herself, too, as being part of the collective identity she pushes for.
It is interesting to consider why a shift from individual liberatory gender politics towards one centered around the identity of a collective has occurred in women’s, feminist, and queer cultural production in Russia in recent years. Perhaps it is the effect of the contemporary trend of “queering,” which Roman Utkin in his “Queer Vulnerability and Russian Poetry After the Gay Propaganda Law” describes as broadly questioning ready-made identities (Utkin, 80). By accounting for ambiguity and negotiation in our understandings of both individual and collective gender identities, cultural works that aim “to queer” present a solution to Butler’s warning against the alleged limitations of collectively oriented identity politics. Though Vasyakina’s “Wind of Fury – Songs of Fury” does favor the collective over the individual, its “radical lesbian solidarity” rendered through the violence of her lyric style questions dominant gender identities at the collective level, allowing readers to imagine a new and liberatory world (Utkin, 95).